I trust Apple with my data over any other prominent tech company. In fact, I’d go as far as saying I think privacy is something that draws people to Apple (aside from the usual points around build quality, experience and all the rest of it).

I think one needs to differentiate between services that Apple needs to make money from, and services which exist to sell Apple’s hardware. I’d argue that iMessage is the latter type. It does Apple no good to make it cross-platform (and likely harms them financially), as much as it would make my life easier. Other services absolutely have to be cross-platform as they need to make money from the services themselves.

If Apple were to develop iMessage into some kind of payment network or e-commerce offering, then I could see it needing to be cross-platform, but otherwise I can’t see any upside for them.

In an ideal world (for the consumer), Google and Apple would develop a universal technical standard based on the functionality of iMessage that would supersede SMS but for incompatible devices or devices out of data reach.

But there’s no commercial reason for them to do this unless they trade their users’ data to each other as part of the deal, or if they both decide to take on Facebook. The reason WhatsApp and Messenger hold the market isn’t to do with how good or bad these apps are, but simply because both have a large userbase, meaning people can find their friends on these services and will continue to use them while they are useful.

The dominant market share of Facebook is self preserving unless a significant portion of the userbase leave in droves or an enterprise with a combined userbase exceeding Facebook’s - Apple and Google together enter the market.

But Antitrust Law would probably step in and penalise Facebook and Google acting as a cartel to thwart competition, meaning the new technical standard would have to be open source.

I’d go as far as saying I think privacy is something that draws people to Apple (aside from the usual points around build quality, experience and all the rest of it).

I have no data to argue against this point, however a funny point that comes to mind is that a family member who worked for a large internet security company until a few weeks ago had his Macbook swapped for a Windows PC (HP, I think) as the Apple wasn’t capable of running security protocol to meet their standards.